> To those who know:
>> I do not know if this will in any way effect (positively or
> negatively) the present mess, but here is my query. I am in
> the USA but all of my subscriptions are through IRLEARN because
> that was how I learned of the lists. Would it be better if I
> UNSUBed from IRLEARN and SUBed to GENBANK since that is the
> USA node? Also, given the apparant problems with the automatic
> system at IRLEARN would moving to a different list help
> reduce the problem? I await instructions.
>
I am not going to ask people to start reorganizing their subscriptions
at this point, particularly if the possibility exists that BIOSCI may
be overhauled. If we decide on a different arrangement we will try to
handle all of the shuffling around ourselves by simply exchanging
mailing lists. This will prevent another batch of SUBSCRIBE notices
going to the newsgroups 8-).
The BIOSCI system was originally set up to allow people to participate
through their "national" node. In the U.S. this was BIONET a few
years back and in the U.K. the counterpart was SERC Daresbury. The
University of Uppsala was added for Scandinavia and then IRLEARN for
all of EARN, the European Academic Research Network. As you can see,
the territory was enlarged with the third and fourth nodes partly
because it was becoming apparent that coordination problems were
increasing.
People in the Americas are supposed to sign up here at GenBank, but
because of the automatic signup mechanism for LISTSERV on BITNET/EARN,
it would be too much work to strictly enforce this rule. We'd have to
be canceling and rearranging subscriptions on a daily basis. I hope
we will come up with a simplification for the whole ball of yarn soon.
Sincerely,
Dave Kristofferson
GenBank Manager
kristoff at genbank.bio.net